President of the CBI Sir Roger Carr today said there was more to do 'salvage the reputation of business'

Some of Britain’s corporate giants and their bosses have been greedy and have forgotten fairness, the leader of the country’s biggest business lobby group warned yesterday.

CBI president Sir Roger Carr said employers need to work to urgently ‘salvage the reputation of business’.

He told more than 1,000 business leaders at the CBI’s annual conference that the corporate sector is littered with examples of ‘bad behaviour’.

Sir Roger is also chairman of Centrica, the owner of British Gas, which is under fire for raising its energy bills just as winter begins.

Sir Roger, who did not name and shame any individual firms, said: ‘As businesses and individuals, standards have been variable, greed occasionally prevalent and fairness forgotten in a number of sectors.

‘Banking and media [are] at the forefront, but others from all walks of life sometimes also show signs of bad behaviour.’

Sir Roger, who was chairman of Cadbury when it was controversially bought by the American processed cheese giant Kraft, said it is wrong to ‘tar’ all firms with the same brush.

Ruling the rule: Sir Roger Carr (right) with Ian King BAE Systems Chief Executive and John Cridland, Director General CBI, were all at the conference today

He said it is wrong to say that ‘all energy companies rip you off, when they don’t, all bankers are despicable, when they are not, or big business is bad business, when it isn’t’.

His attack comes amid a growing controversy about the amount of tax paid by some of the biggest names in business such as Google, Starbucks and Amazon.

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For example, Google paid only £6million to the Treasury last year on UK sales of £2.6billion.

Business Secretary Vince Cable said it is easier to make the case for businesses when they act responsibly on executive pay and tax.

Warning: David Cameron and George Osborne have been warned by Sir Roger Carr to stop large scale austerity measures

Mayor of London Boris Johnson told
the conference in London that ‘Google and co’ should either change their
tax arrangements or do more to serve society by taking on more
unemployed 18 to 24-year-olds.

A Google spokesman said: ‘We make a substantial contribution to the UK economy through local, payroll and corporate taxes.

‘We also employ over 2,000 people,
help hundreds of thousands of businesses to grow online and invest
millions supporting new tech businesses in East London. We comply with
all the tax rules in the UK.’